Cape Town

Tshabalala-Msimang: ‘no hidden agendas’. Credit: SHAUN HARRIS/PICTURENET AFRICA

South Africa's health department is setting up a panel of experts to tackle the AIDS epidemic, health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang confirmed this week.

The panel of some 30 local and international experts will “explore all aspects of… developing prevention and treatment strategies that are appropriate to the African reality,” she says in a press release.

The minister is hoping to reassure AIDS activists, who have accused the government of wilfully mismanaging the epidemic in South Africa, that the panel will be free to work to its own conclusions.

But she has not confirmed or denied the rumour that controversial biochemist Peter Duesberg of the University of California at Berkeley — who claims that the HIV virus is not the cause of AIDS — may be on the panel.

“Those with more extreme views are unlikely to participate because we are looking for a consensus,” she says. AIDS activists continue to suspect that the government line supports the Duesberg claim.

The panel will review the general prevention and treatment (as well as the causes and diagnosis) of HIV/AIDS and opportunistic infections. It will also review the prevention of infection following rape or needle-stick injuries, and from mother to child.

The South African government recently refused to supply anti-retroviral drugs such as AZT to pregnant women within the state health system. It apparently believes that the risks of using the drugs outweigh the benefits, despite advice to the contrary from different expert groups (see Nature 403, 692; 2000). Tshabalala-Msimang says this decision could be reconsidered if the panel convincingly shows that treatment would be effective. But an “ingenious solution” to the difficulties of financing the treatment would need to be found in such a case, she says.

Tshabalala-Msimang denies claims by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) that the panel is “a justification for the immoral, unscientific and unlawful decision” not to give the drugs to pregnant women. “I hope the work of the panel will demonstrate that we have no hidden agendas,” she says.

The TAC has challenged the minister and her advisers to publish evidence from any scientific study to prove that provision of AZT is not economically feasible in South Africa, or that AZT is toxic to mother or child when given to women in the last trimester of pregnancy.